There’s a moment in the bridge of “Black Peter,” the death-obsessed Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter ballad written in 1969, in which Garcia’s guitar encapsulates precisely the song’s many-layered presentation of contrasts.

In “Black Peter” we observe the song’s narrator near the end of life, as he swings between grandiose philosophical notions of death and also more measured acknowledgements of mundane day to day life. ‘Everything leads up to this day,’ he says. But also, ‘It’s just like any other day.’

That guitar part? It’s the sparklingly placed F chord that sits near the end of the bridge, a beat before the ‘Shine through my window’ line. In a song that ultimately spotlights the dichotomy between the everyday and the eventful, the sonic character of the chord grants it almost supernatural status. It lies between two dimensions, at home in both.

That F chord is just like every other chord, a building block of song, but also, everything leads up to it.

It’s that kind of contrast, that dichotomy, that inhabits the soul of Garcia—as inspired by Frankenstein as he was Jack Kerouac and the beats—and the Grateful Dead. And it was the paradox of the Grateful Dead that director Amir Bar-Lev aimed to shine a light on in the expansive, emotional Long Strange Trip, the decade-in-the-making, nearly four-hour long look at the Grateful Dead coming to Amazon Prime June 2.

“Hunter’s songs are slippery that way,” says Bar-Lev when we met in late May in Manhattan. “When a Grateful Dead song is working just right, you’re forced to confront yourself. And that happens in the film: where do YOU stand on a certain issue? I try to do that with storytelling, and it’s relatively easy to do with the Grateful Dead, because there are inherent paradoxes.”

A paradox that Long Strange Trip repeatedly returns to is the concept of capturing an experience that’s meant to be enjoyed in the moment. A key segment of the film relates Garcia’s philosophy concerning the permanence, or desired lack thereof, of art. Many artists, of course, seek to create work that will outlive them. Garcia, ever the cheerful contrarian, was famously unfussy with the afterlife of shows and the songs performed. His reaction to tapers recording concerts? “Once we’re done with it, they can have it.”

The irony, then, is that Deadheads, a most detail and data-driven bunch, crafted an archive (both with a small ‘a’ and a large ‘A’) that will soon be older than the Grateful Dead itself.

“The deeper truth is that these things are in symbiotic relationship with each other,” says Bar-Lev. “If you take a ‘long’ view of things, but only go so far, you start to think about creating monuments and institutions to try and cheat death.

“But if you take the longest view, you realize that even those things will fade, and you’re left committing yourself to the present moment. So Jerry’s insistence on living in the moment, and the fans’ passing those moments into the future, as a gift to the future, are not so opposed as they may appear to be.”

This strange and beautiful coexistence is rendered beautifully, via clever narrative motifs and impactful imagery, throughout Long Strange Trip. But if there is one onscreen figure who embodies this role, who steps forward and, Shakespeare-like, offers observations on the proceedings, it’s John Perry Barlow, songwriting partner to guitarist/singer Bob Weir, self described as existing both “inside and outside” the Grateful Dead, and, in a sense, an ombudsman of sorts within the Grateful Dead universe. We encounter Barlow several times in the film, and he embodies a unique but related role in each appearance, whether it’s a straight talker in a sit down interview, a free-wheeling thinker behind the wheel, or the stern old pal tending to original keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s grave.

Photo: Amazon

“Barlow, I think admirably, falls on both sides of the issue of control,” observes Bar-Lev. “He professes to have wanted Jerry to put his foot down in the 70s when the Hell’s Angels were hanging around. But he also understood that if the Grateful Dead were to message too much, than it would impact their ability to get into the future.”

To get into the future, past monuments, past institutions.

“Barlow understands the reasons why Jerry didn’t want to assume the mantle of leader of a tribe, with prescriptions and proscriptions. Garcia saw the danger in charismatic leaders, and he also saw that the magic of the Grateful Dead was coming from everybody—not him. And if you could get that across to people, the Grateful Dead could go on forever, because it wouldn’t be dependent on one person.

“My favorite line in the whole film, in a way, is ‘If the Grateful Dead became a religion, it would prevent us from getting into the future properly.’ And that story is still playing out at the moment: how will the Grateful Dead get into the future?”

And Bar-Lev admits that it’s simplistic to state that Garcia was unconcerned with the future.

Photo: Amazon

“On some level, he was always thinking about the future. Barlow has asked this: What kind of ancestor are you going to be? Jerry WAS interested in what kind of an ancestor he was going to be. That’s why the last line you hear from him in the film is about what Jack Kerouac’s book did for him. Jerry understood that the way art works, and the way love works, is it creates a ripple that moves through time. If you can actually be in the moment, and be selfless, you’re building towards the future in a way that’s much more efficacious than monument building is.

“There is something that can be built, but it can only be built with no intention towards freezing a thing—it has to be a living thing.”

see also

Bar-Lev even offers pragmatic perspective on the much maligned 90s era, in which the stadium-filling Dead were inundated with not only the much-discussed party element there only for the so-called scene, but also, importantly, enthusiastic new fans. The Dead at the end were loved to death, but perhaps that was inevitable.

“The Grateful Dead is an important part of the cultural bloodstream, and that’s partially due to the 90s. So you can’t lament that the 90s happened.”

But could a Grateful Dead could happen again? It’s a question Bar-Lev is asked often.

“I think the question should be directed at the fans. Would you LET a Grateful Dead happen again?”

An enduring image in Long Strange Trip is recently unearthed footage of Jerry Garcia in the early 70s, backstage and peering into a camera, smiling.

“When Jerry is looking through the lens of that camera, I think he understands full well that he’s looking at time travelers from the future, which is us, that are looking back at him.”

We, the time travelers, are connecting with Garcia somewhere along the ever-moving river of time that Garcia knew existed, a river that contains every emotion, every moment of joy and fear, that we’ve experienced.

“The idea of the film was to evoke that place where consideration of our own mortality and attention to the moment are coexisting. That to me is evoked in a song like “Brokedown Palace” or “Attics Of My Life“: Time is exploded, and love remains.”